ACCC pins ADSL wholesale price

The ACCC has settled another piece of unfinished business in the broadband market, announcing yesterday that it has issued a “service declaration” for Telstra’s wholesale ADSL service.

In service declarations, the regulator has the power to set prices ad other terms for bottleneck services – those required by all players in an industry, but for which there is limited or no competition.

For ISPs that own infrastructure, access to Telstra’s physical infrastructure has long been operated under a service declaration covering ULL (unconditioned local loop) and LSS (line spectrum sharing) services. Those declarations, however, do not cover customers connected to Telstra DSLAMs resold by third parties.

The declaration sets a per-customer price of $AU25.40 (metro) and $AU30.80 (rural and regional) per month for the customer port. In addition, retailers will acquire domestic backhaul – the AVC (aggregating virtual circuit) or VLAN service – at a regulated price of $45.50 per Mbps per month, falling to $33.65 per Mbps per month in July 2012.

These are interim prices only, with the ACCC calling for industry input before March 30 to set a final price. ®